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FEAST #10 Proposals

Please preview the proposals for the FEAST #10 (Saturday, February 26).

We look forward to speaking with all of you. Good luck!

Community Cooking Club

Community Cooking Club is an experimental cooking class that engages the public in cooking and eating food together. 20 participants break into groups and work together to decipher different recipes, which we collaboratively prepare using ingredients from the local green market and then eat together at a communal table. Guest artists, educators, authors and people from the creative community share recipes with the CCC each month, and menus are built around a theme. The Community Cooking Club’s mission is to use cooking, an artful, everyday experience, to empower the lives of people in urban environments and to deliver physical and mental health to communities. Through discussion, social bonding, and working in groups, participants are brought out of isolated routines and interact in new ways to activate their minds and bodies.

Participants currently pay $12 to cover the cost of ingredients. Kitchen space has been donated since June 2010 by NYU, Sweet Deliverance kitchen, Etsy and Bruce High Quality Foundation University (funded by Creative Time), however donated kitchen space is quickly dwindling. We would like to partner with St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral (former) school cafeteria in NYC or Hot Bread Kitchen in Harlem to hold a CCC event. Funding from FEAST would cover: kitchen rental, transporting groceries, administration costs, a printed cookzine and a guest artist honorarium. The CCC community is the FEAST community: we are all invested in learning, eating, sharing and supporting the empowerment, health and connectivity of our communities. Please consider supporting the Community Cooking Club program!

The UseRefuse Spectacle

Take in the collage of sights and sounds that create Brooklyn, the Utz chip bags and Grandma’s Oatmeal cookie wrappers blowing down the street, the giggling kids fresh out of school tumbling down the sidewalk. On a daily basis, Brooklyn’s youth are bombarded by a plethora of physical and mental garbage: trash, junk food, and brand consciousness. In contrast to this wasteful surplus, there is a deficit of art programs and resources to nurture creative expression. How can we transform these environmental realities into a unifying act of art?

Our proposed project is to create a sculptural spectacle at a Brooklyn school whose art programs and resources have been eliminated. The sculpture would be comprised of material created from urban harvest, aka, up-cycled plastic bags and packaging that transform into art. This re-purposed material is called UseRefuse and is handmade by two Brooklyn artists, Marea Judilla and Edith Corra. Trash would be collected from the surrounding community as well as student input regarding the design and scope of the installation. In addition, a vigil or event would be planned to celebrate the artwork. Video documentation of the process to completion, interviewing students, community members, and educators would be a lasting testament to the power of art. The ultimate result would be to re-purpose not only materials but also the vital assets of the community: youth, art education, and Brooklyn’s multicultural history.

Sweep

HUSK proposes to plant broomcorn along the Gowanus Canal this spring. Broomcorn is a type of Sorghum that was once commonly used to make brooms. In fact Brooklyn was once home to something of a broom making industry. With the introduction of synthetic materials broomcorn cultivation declined and the broom making industry left Brooklyn. We will revisit this industrial/ agricultural history through the cultivation of this forgotten crop and by offering a broommaking workshop with the harvested plants. In doing so we will also draw attention to the proposed clean up and remediation of the environmentally degraded canal area.

With the help of the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corp. we have secured a spot to grow our crop along the canal. The proposed location is the park overlooking the canal at the edge of the Lowes parking lot on 9th Street. The garden will be open to the public and we will encourage participation in unique harvesting processes. All funding will go towards seeds, tools, irrigation, maintenance and supplies for the broommaking event.

Closing The Loop

Since its inception in 2006, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy [GCC] has engaged communities of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens and Redhook to take an active role in the cleaning of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. The GCC organizes volunteers for monthly “Clean and Green” days- weeds are pulled, healthy soil is spread, trees are planted, and debris is removed. In 2010 alone, our growing volunteer force built three street-end parks- all of which filter stormwater before it runs into the canal.

This spring, the GCC is launching the new program “Composting Gowanus!” The vision is to compost the plant material collected from Clean and Greens, together with kitchen scraps from local restaurants, coffee grounds from coffee shops, sawdust from woodshops, and organic byproducts from other local sources. The compost will serve as a soil amendment at canal street-end parks and produce a supply of healthy organic matter available to the community.

The goal for this first year is to distribute 5-gallon buckets to our local restaurant partners (the number of buckets per business will depend on need). Our volunteers will pick up the buckets weekly via bicycle and trailer. The food scraps will be composted and reintroduced into the community as soil nutrients -thus CLOSING THE LOOP.

We have the volunteers!
Clean and Greens are planned!
Compost bins are built!
Partnerships with local businesses are happening!

The Brooklyn Musical Petting Zoo

Brooklyn Musical Petting Zoo will be a gathering of unusual musical instruments brought together for an educational one day fair. People will be able to see the instruments up close, touch them, and hear them played. BMPZ will help people realize just how many rich sounds there are to be discovered, and this small collection will be just the tip of the iceberg! Though most instruments will be chaperoned by their owners, I will do thorough research so that I may be available as a resource to maximize people’s experiences. Emphasis will be placed on the cultures of origin of these instruments. It is important to connect people with alternative musical traditions so that they can be preserved. Two take-home brochures and a website will serve as auxiliary learning tools. The first brochure will be a catalog of the instruments at the Petting Zoo, fully illustrated with a brief paragraph about each one. The second brochure will contain instructions for making a couple of different instruments from everyday items. The website will go up on or before the day of the Petting Zoo. It will have all the information in the brochures, but with sound files of the different instruments. The web address will be printed at the bottom of the brochures. These measures ensure that BMPZ is an experience that can be carried further than just one magical day. BMPZ’s aim is to celebrate music and allow all kinds of people from around the borough to learn and connect.

The Anywhere Organ

Pipe organs are astounding instruments. So much of their personality is shaped by the space around them, tempering their sound and reverberations, allowing room for an infinite variety of instruments. Unfortunately nearly every pipe organ in is bolted into a wall staring longingly at architecture all day. This is why I’m creating the Anywhere Organ.

I’ve designed a system where each note, each pipe of an organ is attached to a central air supply through a flexible hose. The air to each organ pipe is computer controlled with an electronic valve. It can be interfaced with in a thousand different ways. The pipes can be arranged in batches and distributed across any space to capture its unique sound. This means the instrument can be installed anywhere; a park, a fire escape, or a secret underwater cave. It also means that anyone can participate in the project. I’d like to get people playing with the Anywhere Organ so they can see the effect space has on music and sound.

Churches are switching over to digital music, getting rid of their pipe organs. It’s sad to see such a cool instrument phased out. However, this means that there are entire registers of pipes available for a song. I’m also reaching out to the awesome music and hacking scene in Brooklyn, finding collaborators who want to help create new music with the system and finding amazing venues to install the project in.

Homeland

“Homeland” is a Wet-Plate Collodion photo essay focusing on grassroots efforts to rebuild life after the collapse of the American economy. By documenting communities and individuals in NYC and across the country, this project aims to connect disparate communities and individuals into a national movement with common ideological threads. The range of projects documented will include urban farms, bicycle collectives, off-the grid homes, alternative fuel producers, art and theatre collectives, community dinners, free schools and after-school programs, squats, itinerants, tent cities and other grassroots social practices.

Wet-Plate is a photographic process related to the daguerrotype where a plate of glass or tin is covered with collodion, sensitized, and developed within a span 15 minutes. It requires a portable dark-room, chemicals, and a large-format camera to shoot in the field.

The FEAST grant will fund travel and materials for a series of field shoots in NYC and Upstate New York. Sites include “The Bushwick Trailer Park”, “Regeneration Farm”, “Grub”, “Germantown Farm”, “Eagle Street Rooftop Farm” and more.

This project is significant to the FEAST community because it will aggregate many independent projects taking a visionary approach to social change into a single history. This body of work will serve as a document to share with others, taking a hopeful perspective about how mass social change is possible through small, independent acts.

Human Cheese

Human Cheese – a local, natural, ethical, sustainable system for sourcing, creating and distributing human cheese. I will use the grant to purchase human milk, scientific monitoring and molecular gastronomy tools, create exquisite packaging and an immersive dinner/exhibition experience that creates a space for discussion around what human cheese as product means, and what we want our future to be. Human Cheese is an experiment in creating applied biotechnology and ethical & sustainable food systems. ??Biotechnology is revolutionizing life, with little public knowledge or attention. Consider new uses of the human body made possible by recent developments in biotechnology. Hidden technologies often enable unsustainable and unethical ways of life. Industrialized food systems are a prime example: we abuse animals, exploit people, pollute the earth, and destroy our bodies as we eat – but these processes are largely invisible. Food is a site of contention and revolution, one of our strongest links to the natural world, and a wonderful vehicle for discussion (as FEAST exemplifies). Human cheese offers a unique entry into this discussion: Human milk is the only living thing which exists solely for the purpose of human consumption, while cheese is one of our oldest biotechnologies, and the first FDA approved genetically modified food.??I will create a dinner amidst the artifacts of 3 different proposed scenarios of Human Cheese as product: DIY, fair trade boutique, and industrialized system. Through the immersive consumption of food metaphors and real human cheese, I aim will create a space for discussion: How do we understand what is natural, healthy, ethical? What are the possibilities and limits of creating sustainable food systems? As we begin to use each others’ bodies as factories how do our social and ethical norms evolve?

ExiTrip

ExiTrip is a collaborative project by Artist/Engineer Lea Bertucci and Ed Bear. We have selected this specific outmoded device, the iTrip Nano FM transmitter, to exemplify the potential impact of re-engineering consumer devices originally destined for landfills. As is, the iTrip only functions with a single generation of iPod Nano, which is no longer manufactured. At 40¢ each on Ebay, the low price creates unprecedented distribution opportunities for a low power transmitter and encourages end-user experimentation. We have hacked the iTrip to function without necessity of an iPod, vastly increasing its usefulness as a development platform for artists and designers. In 2010 and 2011, we will distribute these hacked devices to artists of different disciplines and document their work for a forthcoming book.
An express goal of this project is to empower artists with diverse technical and creative backgrounds to create works using radio. This constitutes a social experiment and community building exercise that documents creative responses to a common tool.
The occupation of the public in Hertzian space is fundamentally controlled by access to electronic technology. To advance the practice of repurposing commercial electronics is to further the reach, relevance, and accessibility of transmission in art and society. The proposed project will critically, materially, and publicly develop, experiment with, and codify the historical and contemporary relationship between creative electronics and transmission artists. How can we, as artists, thinkers, hackers and designers break the cycle of electronic waste that is perpetuated by planned obsolescence and bad design?